Chocolate Panna Cotta

So good and deeply chocolately, but the port wine ice cream didn't freeze solid. Too much alcohol, I guess. Excellent flavor, more of a sauce. I haven't checked it this morning to see if a night in the freezer did the trick.

No one is complaining--steak toothsome and perfectly cooked, potatoes with fresh chives, sour cream, whipped butter AND home made bacon bits to die for. Broccoli and salad healthful. What more, then?

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Chocolate Panna Cotta + Port Wine Ice Cream

I don't normally make fancy desserts. Cookies and fruit salad are the norm in our household if there even is dessert. But the intense chocolate whatever-it-was with the port wine ice cream that we ate at Poste in DC inspired me. And S.O.'s birthday needed a proper dessert. Usually I make a marble cake if there's time, but one huge cake and three people equals over-indulgence. So we have instead eight helping of panna cotta instead of 20 helpings of cake. And the ice cream will keep and I hope we don't go whole hog (in this case an apt description) and gobble it all down. I'll do photos when the dessert is served. Tonight.

We also have rib eye steaks, baked potatoes with ALL the trimmings, broccoli, and mesclun salad with cherry tomatoes and avocado on the menu. I did this in lieu of all three of us going to a fancy place or a steak house for dinner. These days, that would have been the better part of $200, and instead we are doing it for under $50, and that includes a decent bottle of port which we can savor into the future for a long time. So . . .

Now back to my speech about how I wrote The Shadow Warriors. I hope it is of some interest to the group of administrative assistant professionals who will be the audience. It's always hard to know how interested people are in writing. You wonder. Do they read? What do they read? Do they give two whoops and a holler? I'm redoing a speech I gave years ago and now I realize that speech wasn't very good. Of course hardly anyone heard it because the venue was a downscale suburb and nobody showed up except the librarian and some of my friends. One of those evenings a writer would just as soon forget. Whatever.

Toastmasters is a wonderful organization and has improved my speaking skills greatly, but I still have a ways to go. Goals are good. Self-improvement is good. Promoting one's book is good.

Time to get out of my jammy's. Seems like Saturday.

This morning we had a flicker on the main suet feeder for the first time. Man, that bird is big. Lots of bird business today, and I think I saw a goldfinch, but on the suet not the thistle seed. Is that possible? We have five feeders and it's a job to keep them all full, especially suet in the winter which is soooo popular. I got two big containers from the Audubon society.

I Knew Her When. . . Sort of

Meg Whitman of Ebay fame is running for governor of California. According to Tina Brown's blog, Meg is an arch conservative. Well, not my zebra, not my zoo.

I actually worked at the same company as Meg many moons ago. She was a divisional president and I was an IT dweeb, so we didn't interact. The company was forever trying to keep a human face (those days are gone forever) and one of the things it did was ask executives (maybe even the rank and file--I don't recall) to bring photos of themselves as a child. Meg's photo was her girlish self with a whopping big fish she had just landed. Cool kid. Cool photo.

One of my colleagues who did interact reported that she had a fantastic stragetic mind. Someone else reported that she was a revolving door for secretaries. Gee. Remember secretaries? How quaint. Maybe she was demanding, as one would expect.

Meg left to work for an internet florist, where she obviously learned a whole lot about net business. The next person to occupy her office had an Oriental rug and a white leather sofa which I promply put into a novel. This divisional president had a hissy fit when we cooked broccoli in the IT microwave. It did stink and we were on the same floor. I never cooked any, but some did. Actually fish in the microwave at lunch time is worse.

Speaking of food, and aren't we always, this week I made Chicken Piccata from Cook's Illustrated and it was a winner. The wonderful chocolate/mocca cookies are gone.

S.O. has a birthday and #2 son is arriving, so we're having a pork roast with creamed spinach, mashed potatoes and gravy, applesauce and for dessert- ta da! Chocolate panna cotta with portwine ice cream.

We ate tiny scoops of port wine ice cream in DC at Poste, and it was incredible. I found a recipe on the web. The ice cream tasted to divine with the dark chocolate. Haven't made panna cotta in ages. So we are in for a feast, and then the leftover pork will naturally be Roast Pork Fried Rice. We're doing all this in lieu of going out.

Have you seen the commercial that asks why spent $40 on a family dinner out when you can eat pizza on the cheap? My question is: where except a fast food establishment can you have a family dinner for $40? Certainly not with wine and tax and tip. Hell, you can barely eat lunch for that.

I submitted a memoir piece to an ezine and have one more submission to make, then everything I've written in the last five years will be out looking for a home. How cool is that?

Off to put the clothes in the dryer. The mundane always calls.

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The 4 Day Vacation - continued

Representations of habitations that will weather naturally at the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. This is a relatively new museum, and what a great one. I'll have more photos in upcoming days. And we just loved the cafeteria featuring native ingredients.

Our Saturday night meal was at Poste, in the Hotel Monaco right in the heart of town by the hockey stadium and a gazillion restaurants. Poste Moderne Brasserie is the complete name. I shared Steak Tartare with S.O. So yummy. Live dangerously, I say. My entree was calves liver with onions three ways, and a crisp slice of bacon. S.O. had a fab. bouef bourgignon and we shared a chocolate dessert that was pure dark chocolate with tiny little scoops of port wine ice cream, carrying delicious to a new height. The menu contained many entrees that sounded tempting. Don't you love it when what to order is the biggest decision you have to make all day? I do.

Back into Monday mode, with all that entails. Had to watch Damages last night to get caught up. Always some new betrayal or conflict. Good.

Now I need to pay some attention to my novel.

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